III. Stories That Misbehave The plots in Tonkato’s books often treated logic as negotiable. In The Clockmaker’s Pocket, time was a thing you could lose, find, and lend—three sisters pooled their minutes for a day at the fair and later discovered that borrowed time tasted faintly of lemon. Another favorite, Miss Alder’s Library of Lost Sounds, collected noises that had slipped out of the world: the secret crackle of ice on a remote pond, the first yawn of a baby fox. The reader was tasked with making a listening map, pressing a fingertip to each page and describing how the page felt like a sound.